Time flies- Ghosts, jumbies and broken down boats on the Demerara

Time goes so fast.

I definitely find this on Sunday mornings with the Monday morning creeping up to ruin your weekend! I also found it on Friday evening as we whizzed along the West Coast highway to a place I hadn’t been for seven years.

Seven years ago, almost to the day, I was staying in the same house on the West Coast with 24 other Project Trust volunteers. All of us were crammed into a gorgeous family house just a stones throw from the sea. The close-quarters forced us to share all these crazy new tropical experiences and we filled the house with lots of jokes and stories even though we must have driven our host family a bit crazy for the week that we invaded!

 

 

It was nice to get out of the city again. Outside of Georgetown can become eerily quiet at night so just to build on the eeriness, we wandered, past a haunted house, to the sea at midnight. The sea is actually the mouth of the Demerara but at this stage, the river is so vast that it stretches away from you just like the sea. We sat a heard some ghost stories. These were made more ghostly due to the accompanying cadaver voodoo doll that someone had placed next to the sea wall as some kind of grievance ritual. I raised the idea of us going for a swim but it was quickly shot down with all these bad omens lying around us.

Finally the friendly face of the morning came and we made our way back to Georgetown. This time we opted for the speed boat that took us from our side of the Demerara River to Stabroek Market in the heart of Georgetown on the other side. The boat quickly filled up and we started chugging our way across the river with the 30 other passengers on their way to get market-day supplies. Mid-chug and midway across the river, the engine slowed to a stop, not a great sound to hear on a boat. Thankfully the driver made some adjustments and it restarted in minutes to a sigh of relief from all the passengers.

 

 

A second week of school has passed- 12 more to go until Christmas. I think saying 12 weeks to go would strike fear into any teacher in the UK but here there are many distractions to break up the weeks. This week’s upcoming distraction is Sports Day on Friday. I haven’t yet decided if I will have an A-Level practical on that day or try to defend my title of 2^nd-to-last in the teachers’ 100m race.